“Sort of”—Eliot, clawing at the air to mime a desperate dog paddle. “It was sink or swim and we swam and I was thinking this is like that.”

“We’re sinking and going to have to swim for it?”

“It would be a bully thing, middle brother, if you took some things seriously, once in a while.”

“You’re so serious about everything that I figure someone has to make up for it.”

Nathaniel spread his hands on the table and studied them for a moment, observing how the light through the skylight brought out the copper tint in his skin—the legacy, which he shared with Eliot, of a (possibly mythological) Creek princess in their mother’s ancestry.

“We’re being tested,” he said. “I mean, we’re supposed to test ourselves.”

“For anything in particular?”

“Not for anything. We’re supposed to put ourselves to a test. I think that’s what this is all about.”

“Of what, Nat?” Eliot, his voice rising in impatience, tweaked the bill of his fisherman’s cap.

“Our characters, I reckon. To see what we’re made of.”

“My character’s fine. I like my character. I think it’s a bully character. Why should I have to test it? And about what I’m made of …” He pulled the skin on the back of his hand, tapped two knuckles together, a hollow knock of bone on bone. “I’m made of that, and so are you, and what is there to find out that we don’t know?”

“Don’t play dumb. What we’re made of in the parts you can’t see. I was thinking, the old man was only three years older than me when he got wounded, and then … then there’s this.…” Nathaniel rose and pulled the box with the sextant from out of the drawer. The schooner lurched; he lurched with it and fell back into his seat. “He saved a whole bunch of people—”

Eliot, cutting him off with a wave: “I know the story, what there is of it to know.”

“We’ve got something to live up to, and this … Being out here on our own …”

He was stopped by Eliot’s expression: a mixture of curiosity and wariness.

“What’s the matter?”

“You make me nervous sometimes, Nat. You make a lot of people nervous. You know that, don’t you?”